Our mission is to join individuals and groups working in different ways to ensure that our children live in a rational, sustainable world.
When enough people abandon the belief that war is inevitable,it will become unthinkable.
War is conducted for corporate Empire. Therefore,the first step to ending war is ending corporate control of the US government.
All social justice efforts lead to the end of war, the ultimate injustice. Those who work for justice are Soldiers For Peace.

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Thursday, September 15, 2011

STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY

America’s greatest wasted resource is its youth. The obvious
corruption in government that three decades of college students have grown up
with have led to a political cynicism in this group that rivals that of their
parents, who lived through the changes in our government that they are still struggling
to understand if they have not given up trying. College students are making
tremendous efforts to prepare for a future that is increasingly uncertain, yet
most have dismissed the value of spending time in protesting a government and
society that has largely abandoned the children of the shrinking middle class
and the growing numbers of the poor.

As a result of such fatalism, only a small number of college
students are engaged in the political process, mostly in the form of education
and protests, neither of which gain much attention in today’s distracted
society. In 2008 they enthusiastically supported candidate Obama, only to
discover that their parents seemed to be right in dismissing all politicians as
liars. Obama has kept very few of the promises he made to average Americans,
while clearly keeping promises to corporate interests arrived at behind closed
doors as he solicited support for his presidential campaign.

As the fascists who control the US government advance toward
their goal of privatizing every government function for their personal profit,
the ability to acquire an advanced education has increasingly become a
privilege rather than the right that Jefferson argued it must be if the
American experiment in democracy is to succeed. As college becomes increasingly
inaccessible to our youth they are left with few choices. With jobs being
shipped overseas by the millions, many fall victim to the job recruiters from
the US military. In effect, they are economic conscripts of international
corporate terrorists.

During the Vietnam War students were much more attuned to
the effects of war on their future. For ten years, an entire generation of
young men faced the prospect of being drafted to fight in a pointless corporate
war. The women who faced the loss of their loved ones were affected as well.
For those of us not yet of age, the future did not look promising and those of
us who understood what was at stake joined the opposition in any way that we
could.

The peace movement in the 60s and early 70s grew despite the
lack of the critical organizing tool of the internet. Only the cynic would
argue that the fact that the corporate media publicized both the war and the
protests allowed the movement to grow. In truth, the reasons the movement
proved unstoppable were that those involved were determined to achieve victory
in spite of the obvious corruption of the US government that declared war on
them. That generation was not indoctrinated in the belief that democracy was
dead. They knew that their entire generation had been made pawns in the war for corporate Empire and that only their combined efforts at resistance couldend the war. They were willing to fight to assure that the hope for democracy in
America would live on.

Students for a Democratic Society was formed to help
organize the members of the resistance to fascism in that day. Like all
organizations it had its growing pains in terms of crises in identity and
leadership. Those involved persevered and over time, SDS became a leader in the
peace movement. It became a leader in promoting the idea that the war was only
a symptom of the disease of fascism. Leaders in the fight for the rights of
women, African-Americans, Native Americans and gays stood shoulder to shoulder
in defense of the right of each of us to liberty and justice.

The only way to engage the youth of the US is to give them reason to hope that
they can become part of the struggle to end fascism and war in our lifetime. If
those of us old enough to remember the victories of the past can use modern
networking tools to get our peers away from their computers and out in the streets,
we may be able to inspire a new generation of students to work for a democratic
society.

Every generation must have its own leaders. Those who have
been in the vanguard of the fight for the last several decades must allow new
leaders to emerge from every generation if they are truly more interested in
the cause than in self-promotion. There are many young men and women prepared
to take up the fight. It is our duty to educate them about our successes and
our failures so that they may look at them with fresh eyes and find ways to use
this knowledge to mold a 21st century strategy to wage asymmetric
warfare against fascism and war.

It is our youth who will live to see the ultimate effects of
the effort to create a democracy in the US from the fascist horror that it has
become. We cannot leave them to their fate just because most have come to
accept that justice and democracy are dead. It took generations for the
fascists to create this illusion and the spell cannot be broken overnight. Good
parents understand that children mature only when they understand that as
adults they will be responsible for their own future and ultimately, for the
future of their own children. This happens when they are given responsibility
and when they have had good role models to emulate.

If students get out on the street with petitions calling on their members of
Congress to introduce a constitutional amendment to abolish corporate
personhood and support any candidate who will, they may yet have reason to hope
that they will live in a democratic society in their lifetime.

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OUR GOAL: The eradication of war by restoring democracy in America.

OUR MISSION: To challenge the US Congress to put the needs of the people above those of their plutocratic sponsors. We can only establish democracy in America and the world by working together to abolish the "rights" of corporations and those who control them to determine the collective destiny of the Peoples of the United States and of the world.

THE PROBLEM: is not that the American government does not work. It works fine for those who own it, just not for the people of America. It is corporate control of Congress that permits the enslavement of Peoples of other nations and ultimately, Americans as well.

Now that the global economic elite are bringing their tools of subjugation to the United States, we must fight back together to ensure that the hope of government of the People, by the People and for the People does not perish from the Earth.

Together, we can mend the social fabric of a broken nation and assure liberty and justice for all the Peoples of the planet we share.

War and lack of health care are symptoms of the same disease: corporate control of the US government. That is why we must take back America for the people by working to pass a Constitutional amendment to get corporate money out of elections and abolish corporate personhood. This is the essential first step to creating true representative government.

Until Americans learn to fight their common enemy instead of each other, there is no reason to expect real change. We must put aside our differences to fight the imposition of a corporate New World Order if we are going to ensure that our children grow up in a rational, sustainable world where war is but a memory.